Health (8)

Trump’s worldview rejects the fact that the Washington swamp includes the hard right wing of the Republican Party, a faction made up of politicians who place race ahead of class and (even more than politicians customarily do) ideology before the public interest.

Safety net commitments were crucial to Trump’s appeal to white working-class voters, the constituency that put him over the top in the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania In Manchin’s West Virginia, Trump swept every county, carrying the state with 67.9 percent of the vote compared with Hillary Clinton’s 26.2.

You might call traditional Medicare the public option,” but giving consumers this choice between federally and commercially administered Medicare is exactly what Speaker Ryan’s A Better Way” plan would do. If you don’t think his plan is market-based, take it up with him.

Scott Walker of Wisconsin suggested that Congress consider a better-funded version of the measure proposed this year by two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, that would offer states more flexibility over how to run their health care programs.

The final Senate bill was likely to be a McConnell substitute in any event, but a committee mark-up would have forced release of the Senate bill’s details much earlier and would have allowed Democrats to force Republican senators to take embarrassing votes or to commit themselves to positions that could make compromise within the Republican caucus difficult.